eXpresso Changes Business Model, Goes IBM Partner Route

From 2011, collaboration firm eXpresso (news, site) will no longer offer its service directly, instead teaming up with IBM and others.

Move Like an Express

Customers currently using enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools from eXpresso have until the end of the year to pull their files from eXpresso's existing service before it restarts to its new partnership-format with the likes of IBM for Symphony/LotusLive users.

The company which offers collaboration software for Microsoft Office and Lotus will, with immediate effect, stop signing up new customers and is encouraging existing users to pull all their files, or get in touch with the file owners, to do so before the end of year. All files will be destroyed on 1 January, so there's only two months to act.

eXpresso says that it hopes that users will switch to IBM's LotusLive, which will be offered at a discount to remaining customers. Features and other details will be confirmed at a later date.

Out of Puff?

eXpresso has been pretty quiet since we covered its addition of online Excel support back in 2009. Its press release archive is similarly bare, no blogs since July and eXpresso stopped tweeting in August, none of which sounds like a confident, thrusting company.

We asked the company what was going on, a statement from eXpresso Corporation in reply stated:

The company will remain as an entity, but our distribution model will be only through partners. The eXpresso application as it is known today will no longer exist. Unfortunately market conditions made remaining a standalone product impossible.

We are hopeful that by partnering with large vendors, such as IBM, we will be able to bring real-time file collaboration to many more people.

There will most likely be some gap in time between when our stand alone application shuts down on 12/31/10 and when our partner applications are available, but hopefully it won’t be too long.